Bushwalker said:
Yes, ok. But... 
We don't live in that kind of state with zero interest, and we do live in the fictional world where we are mostly all slaved to capital. If we want to get into this profitable production of electricity from fuel cells, how much slavery are we up for?
BW the question you ask is a good one. The answer might, however, not be what you expect. Sustainability as a lifestyle and economic system will most likely result in less economic enslavement, and much more free time to pursue that which we enjoy, and rightfully deserve to have as a gift from nature. I fundamentally believe that life and all of it's attributes, desires only to promote that which we also should seek, namely contentment, purpose and fulfilment in living. What we need to do is use the right concepts, and resulting tools to once again become a part of the natural cycles of life.
As a result I believe that our enslavement to the environment to survive, will be reduced as we learn to understand, and sustainably promote the use of natural systems as tools of survival. Finding those systems and learning how to use them is key to human survival. Nature tends to not act with foresight, and is more reactive than proactive. Humans however, hold the faculties that should be used to avoid what nature cannot by itself. Our predictive capability gives planning ability beyond the perceivable horizon, where typically nature needs to learn by trial and error.
Fuel cells that use biofuels is a concept that I think falls within these parameters, a tool that can achieve the goal of being "useful", but without necessarily having a heavy burden on it's externalities. It also lends itself to be a system that can distribute requirements amongst various sources of fuels and resources. As GO pointed out, fuel cells can be driven by different types of biofuels, and also can use different reactive membranes to achieve this. Diversity in this case brings with it less resource depletion and environmental burden, greater redundancy and reduced deployment risk. Overall really a good investment, provided that the source of fuel remains available and abundant.
One further development might fit here: Bacterial batteries. Similar to fuel cells, some forms of iron breathing bacteria (!) can convert sugars directly into electricity (at up to 50% eff.) when they attach themselves to an carbon electrode. These bacteria have a useful metabolism, in that they only reproduce and produce power, when current is drawn from them, when you stop drawing current, they virtually go into stasis. So as a form of battery/fuel cell, these guys would not self-discharge very much, similar to a lead-acid battery, and would actually produce power on demand, with the added bonus of them increasing output if subjected to continuous demand, because the drawing of current causes them to reproduce ie multiply!
Imagine a container filled with a sugar solution, with carbon (graphite) electrodes to which one would simply add a satchel of bacteria, that then "grows" into the desired capacity battery! To charge add sugar water! Sound scifi? Well UMASS are working on it.
Maybe it is possible to get rid of enslavement then, by simply reducing the scale of the slaves, and forcing them to multiply like crazy! Who said population is a problem!
Posted Saturday 14 Jul 2012 @ 10:50:09 am from IP
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We have finally made some headway in WA here, that they at least allow up to 1MW of RE on local independent grids, as of 1st July.
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